11 August 2007

You already learned in my first song basics post that songs are made up of a series of chords. This post introduces a few more simple ideas about song structure that will help you to learn and remember songs.

The chords in a song are arranged into groups whose names are familiar to you I'm sure. The basic song structure is:

Introduction

Verse

Chorus

Ending

There are usually a number of verses, and the chorus is repeated several times. The verse and chorus usually have a different series of chords to play. So you need to learn and remember these different series to play a song.

Each verse or chorus is divided into equal length parts called bars, or measures. In popular music the verses and choruses are often based on patterns of 8 bars. These patterns are repeated which makes the job of learning and memorizing a song easier.

That's really all you need to know about song structure to get started. I'm sure you found that you already knew quite a lot of this music theory.